April 17: KSDT block party and a day off for U.S.

I came to the station this Thursday to find the entire old student center awash with festive class-skipping students. "Who," I wondered, "am I to interrupt such saturnalia, precious as it is to these overworked undergrads?" That, and going to the pub with my old friend Lara sounded like more fun. So to those of you that may have tuned in: sorry if you were expecting the Urban Sprawl.

I will of course be back next week. You can expect a more diverse show. I've decided to keep the genre-centered model available for future installations, when a given style or tendency catches my fancy and seems worth dedicating two hours to. However, your workaday Urban Sprawl show will now feature artists from any of the multitudinous spiral arms of the galaxy Avant Hard.

April 10: Post-Rock

What is post-rock? Or perhaps we should ask, to better reflect the provenance of most of today's bands, Qu'est-ce que c'est le post-rock?

The Latin post means 'after.' What does it mean to be 'after rock'? As we'll hear, for some bands it means playing music that is rock-like in its aesthetic sensibility on a wider range of instruments than is typical to rock music (Godspeed You! Black Emperor). For others, it can be using the instruments of rock to speak a different musical language (Fly Pan Am, Set Fire to Flames, Pelican). At least one other possibility is to amplify the gestures of rock into hyperbolic levels of emphasis: thus the fuzzy guitar becomes a nearly toneless wall of layered noise, and the song structure is stretched in length nearly to its breaking point in Nadja's "Now I Am Become Death ..."

Most of these bands have a keen sense of musical dynamics that, in and of itself, puts them outside, maybe beyond, the genre of rock. The minutes and minutes of building volume, rhythm, and tension in "Static" reach an unbearable pitch until, like a flashbulb, it burns out instantaneously but leaves a softly fading afterimage burned into your eyes. The emotion these mostly Canadian post-rockers so eloquently express is, to me, this: the soft-fading light after the petit mort.

(1) Fly Pan Am - Rompre L'Indifference de L'Inexitable Avant que L'On Vienne Rompre Le Sommeil de L'Iname
(2) Set Fire to Flames - Deja, Comme des Trous de Vent, Comme Reproduit
(3) Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Static
(4) Clogs - I Used to Do
(5) Nadja - Now I Am Become Death, The Destroyer of Worlds
(6) Pelican - Last Day of Winter
(7) A Silver Mt. Zion - God Bless Our Dead Marines
(8) Hrsta - Beau Village
(9) Sigur Ros - Saeglopur

Get the playlist here.

Photo: Godspeed You! Black Emperor

April 3: Metal I

Metal critics are gaga for genre. Maybe this is useful when dealing with such a diverse group of bands. Or maybe, in the words of The Sword drummer Trivett Wingo, "You’re just blowing word vomit out of your anus." Today's bands have been described (roughly following the order of play) as crust, black, stoner, doom, drone, heavy, and folk. A useful taxonomy, or projectile ass-vomit? I'll let you decide. But for Lucifer's sake listen, because whatever the species, the genus is genius.

(1) His Hero is Gone - Like Weeds
(2) Tragedy - You Are a Fucked Up Experiment
(3) Wolves in The Throne Room - Queen of the Borrowed Light
(4) Om - At Giza
(5) Sunn 0))) & Boris - Etna
(6) Nadja - Mutagen
(7) Gnaw Their Tongues - Nihilism: Tied Up And Burning
(8) Khanate - Things Viral
(9) Mastodon - Iron Tusk
(10) The Sword - Barael's Blade
(11) Sunn 0))) - Hell-0)))-Ween
(12) Witchcraft - If Crimson Was Your Colour
(13) Earth - Miami Morning Coming Down II (Shine)

Get the playlist here.

Photo: Sunn 0)))